By Michael Alexander
It’s snowing in parts of New Jersey and New York in October, and in other signs of the apocalypse, the New York Rangers are in first place in the NHL and Marian Gaborik hasn’t torn his groin apart … and we’re seven games in already! (For the record, does anyone else find it hilarious (or fishy) that Gaborik’s replacement in Minnesota, Martin Havlat, injured his groin?)
Gaborik is scoring at a, well, a healthy Marian Gaborik rate while the power play is actually scoring. I’ll give Rangers fans a moment to wipe away their tears of joy at the latter part of that previous sentence. It’s been a truly remarkable start to the season, as the team is riding a six-game winning streak after losing opening night at Pittsburgh.
Wait a second, I’ve seen a start like this before! It was … it was … last year! Ah, that’s right, the Tom Renney-led Rangers kicked off last season’s campaign going 10-2-1, but this start feels different, doesn’t it?
It feels that way because the Rangers felt the pain of Head Coach John Tortorella’s training camp. If you’ve paid attention to the Rangers since the summer, Tortorella has been preaching conditioning from day one, and he wasn’t talking about sprucing up his thinning locks (although I am pretty sure his goat-tee could give Aaron Voros a solid beatdown).
Every pre- and post-game press conference Torts’ has conducted, he has talked about the level of conditioning that the team was at last year and where they are now. It almost seems like an after-thought, but this is really why this team is winning. They are finishing games until the end.
Like any team they’ll have lapses at times throughout a game, but in general they finally have a killer instinct. This is due to the rigorous training camp that the players went through. They skated, and skated, and skated, and probably vomited, and then skated some more. When they fouled up, they got a spanking from Tortorella, and when you put that all together, here they are in first place.
I know it’s October and Voros was the league leader in points last year around this time and hockey fans around the world committed mass suicide, but this team is playing a full 60 and cutting the throats of their opponents, not squeaking by in one-goal nail-biters.
So we’ll continue to watch the pigs fly and Wade Redden get cheers, and hopefully hell will freeze over too, but that would mean Michal Rozsival is playing well.
